Queer Environmentality

Ecology, Evolution, and Sexuality in American Literature

Robert Azzarello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317072812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche LGBT

Offering a model for meaningful dialogue between queer studies and environmental studies, Robert Azzarello's book traces a queer-environmental lineage in American Romantic and post-Romantic literature. Azzarello challenges the notion that reading environmental literature is unsatisfying in terms of aesthetics and proposes an understanding of literary environmentalism that is rich in poetic complexity. With the term "queer environmentality, " Azzarello points towards a queer sensibility in the history of environmental literature to balance the dominant narrative that reading environmental literature is tantamount to witnessing a spectacular dramatization of heterosexual teleology. Azzarello's study treats four key figures in the American literary tradition: Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Djuna Barnes. Each of these writers problematizes conventional notions of the strange matrix between the human, the natural, and the sexual. They brilliantly demonstrate the ways in which the queer project and the environmental project are always connected or, put another way, show that questions and politics of human sexuality are always entwined with those associated with the other-than-human world.

Chapter 1
Nature and Its Discontents

Djuna Barnes spent the last forty-two years of her life living in a small apartment at 5 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. After Paris in the 1920s, and after Nightwood, Barnes published a play, The Antiphon in 1958, but she mostly spent her time writing little poems. One of these poems is called “There Should Be Gardens.” Because her writing process was complicated, often recycling and accumulating adapted phrases for decades, it is difficult to date the poem exactly. But the following is “There Should Be Gardens” as it stood around 1974.

Djuna Barnes writes:

There should be gardens for old men to whimper in,

For where’s the great bull-curl that swagged the leg?

Nothing as vanquished as an old man’s groin

Where now hangs a sullen bag,

A sac of withered infants on his leg.

There is no swarming in him now,

His heart’s an hive

That’s banished all its bees,

He keeps alive

By shivering;

Reverberation of oblivion is his motion,

Disintegration now is all his motion;

Yet cat-wise he will fall, all four feet down

On paradise, the upside down.

(Collected Poems 187)

“There Should Be Gardens” can stand as emblematic for the work of Djuna Barnes, on both stylistic and thematic levels. The poem condenses and articulates a poetic vision that is comparativist in scope—comparativist not in the usual sense of inter-cultural, inter-linguistic, or inter-national, but in the unusual sense of inter-species or inter-being. Comparisons may be odious, but they are nonetheless the basis for poetic expression, for aesthetic creation, for the workings of consciousness.

Barnes’s comparativist poetics yields a symbolic ecology. The human being is never considered as-it-is-in-itself, but always in relation to other beings, to the parts and to the whole, to Being or to Dasein, as Heidegger might say. The organic range and anatomical movement of the poem is dazzling: gardens and hives, old men and their groins, bulls and their legs, withering and shivering, sperm in motion and at rest, bees and cats, reverberations and disintegrations, paradise and the upside down. The effect of this subtly explosive transformation on the main subject of the poem, the old man for whom there should be gardens, though, is not joy, but sadness. “There should be gardens for old men to whimper in.” What kind of ecological sensibility, metaphysical position, onto-theological prescience—all of which may end up amounting to the same thing—is this?

The poem is divided formally into two sections: the two stanzas. Conceptually, however, the poem involves a different topography of division. Conceptually, the poem is also divided into two sections, but in this regard it is the first line and everything after. The first line is an ethical claim—“There should be gardens for old men to whimper in”—and everything after justification for why there ought to be gardens. Lines two through fourteen, in other words, confront the ethical ought. Line two, the rhetorical question—“For where’s the great bull-curl that swagged the leg?”—begins a series of ontological answers to explain the profound sadness, and humiliation, in the old man’s inability to slow time and hence, unfortunately, his ability to waste away. Embedded within these ontological answers, the tone of the poem is unapologetically and almost mockingly cruel. The vanquished old man, disintegrating into the push and pull of the elements, becomes a site of spectacular amusement. He becomes a joke for the poet and her audience.

For Barnes, the ethical injunction becomes a parody of the ethical injunction. There is a sense of delight in the poet’s voice, achieved through stylistic innovation. Hers is a delight in witnessing the finality of the old man’s being, not only of his death, but also, and more importantly, of his self-reflexive realization of his own end. He is in full consciousness of his downfall and this understanding is precisely why he whimpers. The poet’s tonal delight infuses the poem and helps us to recognize the parody. If ethics presupposes a serious ethical agent, capable of decision-making within the extra-human realm, a kind of objective outside, Barnes brings an acute absurdity to the pursuit. Seriousness turns back against itself.

Thematically, “There Should Be Gardens” is part of Barnes’s larger poetic project. Dated around 1974, the poem continues her sustained parody of reproduction that admiring—and perhaps unadmiring—readers have noted in her earlier work, especially her oft-anthologized short story “Smoke” (1917), her first novel Ryder (1928), and her magnum opus Nightwood (1936). If one’s participation in the propagation of the species is supposed to return a bankable immortality, “Gardens” renders futile this bio-symbolic investiture in the future. There is “nothing as vanquished as an old man’s groin.” His scrotum has become “a sullen bag.” His testicles, sacs of “withered infants.” He survives through shivering, that involuntary reflex that coldly bespeaks its own imminent end, the cessation of shivering and survival.

Why should this existential drama take place against the backdrop of the garden? The garden, as part of the pastoral tradition in poetic language, invokes an escape from the purely cultural, from civilization and the technological. The garden invokes a return to simplicity and peace. There should be gardens, then, at least ostensibly, to alleviate the pain and suffering of old men. For the garden to be a place to get back to the tranquility of nature, for the garden to be a place of relief, its nature would have to be of a very particular kind. The garden as nature could not be the nature of the wilderness tradition, in which danger lurks behind every corner, in which one’s purpose is to test one’s purpose. Instead, the garden as nature would have to serve as the harmonious middle ground between nature and culture, in which human aesthetic intention, other-than-human beings, and physical processes come together to create something of beauty. But Barnes does not believe this literary leitmotif to be true, or at least not wholly true outside of its literary parameters. For Barnes, the garden represents the strange conjunction between comedy (as I have noted in her parodic tone) and tragedy. The garden, expected to counteract the knowledge of mortality, does not console, but reveals the most terrorizing aspects of each of the components in this middle ground between nature and culture. The garden becomes the site to suffer biological disintegration, the severe callousness of nature, but the garden also becomes the site to register, through poetic representation, that suffering as culturally, as intra-humanly, significant. The tropological garden surprisingly reveals a human ecology of death; the Edenic drive becomes an impulsion into unexpected horror.

This garden has an ambiguous denouement, as indeed does the poem itself. The final two lines of the poem, introduced through the mysterious conjunction “yet,” offer a potential—albeit an extremely ambiguous potential—for some sort of redemption. “Yet cat-wise he will fall, all four feet down / On paradise, the upside down.” For Barnes, Oedipus’s solution to the Sphinx’s riddle was wrong, or at least not wholly right. The final stage of human being is not three-footed, hunched over with cane, but once again fallen, down on all fours. Furthermore, the final stage of human being is not wise, but cat-wise, cat-like, like a cat, forced to reconcile with its animal nature. But the wise persists beyond its signifying like. It does more than indicate a similarity between human and feline animality. In this paradise, the upside down, the old man finally may achieve wisdom, or rather, a kind of wisdom, of feline wisdom whatever that may be. For Barnes, through her comparativist poetics, this queerly ecological vision will be the subject of endless interpretation and reinterpretation, of sustained imagination and reimagination.

“There Should be Gardens,” the entire corpus of Djuna Barnes, as well as the writings of a number of other major figures in the American literary tradition, all require a critical point of view that draws from diverse schools of thought, a theoretical synthesis that can capture the multiple thematics dwelling within the text. To this end, the chief objective of Queer Environmentality is to promote a meaningful exchange between queer studies and environmental studies, two fields that have historically lacked much contact, by tracing a queer-environmental lineage in American Romantic and post-Romantic literature. I intend for this queer-environmental synthesis to have both aesthetic and political implications. For those of us whose aesthetic taste leads us to think that reading environmental literature is like watching grass grow, I will propose an alternative understanding of literary environmentalism, rich in tropological abundance, poetic complexity, and hermeneutic indeterminacy. For those of us whose political taste leads us to think that reading environmental literature is like watching a spectacular dramatization of heterosexual teleology, I will magnify a queer sensibility, present in varying degrees, in this history, or what I call “queer environmentality.” At its most foundational, this term will mean a habit of thought that conceptualizes human beings, other life forms, and their environments as disregarding—and, at times, flaunting their disregard for—the ostensibly primary, natural law “to survive and reproduce.”

In order to develop this environmental counter-history, this queer supplement, Queer Environmentality revolves around four key figures in the American literary tradition: Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Djuna Barnes. Each of these figures problematizes conventional notions of the strange matrix between the human, the natural, and the sexual, and thus challenges the assumption that the subject of American environmental literature is essentially and consubstantially heterosexual. Each brilliantly demonstrates the ways in which the queer project and the environmental project are always already connected, that is to say, in which the questions and politics of human sexuality are always entwined with the questions and politics of the other-than-human world.

Like Charles Darwin, the four primary objects of my analysis—Thoreau, Melville, Cather, and Barnes—believe in reconsidering the human as a natural being, as a species, or type of being, that occupies a particular niche in the order of things, and, therefore, as subject to the explanatory gestures afforded to other species that also constitute and populate their particular biological kingdom. But figuring the human as natural in this way does not provide a stable ontology, nor does it permit an escape from all kinds of epistemological problematics. Like Henri Bergson, each writer takes seriously the profound connection between ontology and epistemology—between theory of life, on the one hand, and theory of knowing life, on the other. Each writer thus offers long meditations on the super-saturation of life—human and otherwise—with desires and aims, with indeterminate geneses and inexplicably deferred endpoints. Thoreau’s sense of “sensuality” within the animal-human-divine matrix, Melville’s symbolic struggle with extra-human forces, Cather’s cryptic musings on the singularity of organic composition, and Barnes’s biologically inflected—perhaps infected—decadence all point to an environment as explosive with meaning, with “interlinked terrors and wonders” (Moby-Dick 139), as the creatures that dwell within.

If one considers the critical histories of queer studies and environmental studies, one notices a disconnection, bordering on outright tension, between the two fields. Queer Environmentality thus begins theoretically by exploring the disconnect between the queer project, especially queer literary criticism, and the environmental project, especially ecocriticism. The tension between the two fields seems to stem from the very different use of “the natural” within the two discursive histories. The major question that will serve as the leitmotif of a queer-ecocritical synthesis will be: what is at stake for queers, on the one hand, and environmentalists, on the other, in the rhetorical development and political deployment of the concept of nature and its variations? The concept of nature has a long, tortuous—even torturous—history, especially in the American context. This history has been well documented in the scholarly research since at least the publication of Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land in 1950 and has included much subsequent work, such as Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), Roderick Frazier Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975), and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), to name just a few of the most significant.1

What I would like to accomplish in Queer Environmentality draws on this research by taking seriously the intellectual history and symbolic life of nature and its variations, but Queer Environmentality does something quite different. This book focuses on the concept of nature as a site of contention between two distinct theoretical-political projects: queer and environmental. The contention between these two projects, I will argue, is structural; it is built into the very fabric of the terminology, and thus unavoidable. But I should be quick to note that this unavoidable contention between the two projects, especially concerning the concept of nature, is also productive in its own ways, and thus not necessarily lethal to a synthesis between them. In fact, to put it in stronger terms, the contention is good; it is mutually beneficial to the two projects and welcome because it brings to light the many ways that queer theory needs ecocritical insight just as much as ecocritical theory needs queer insight.

In the remainder of this introductory chapter, then, my analysis of “nature and its discontents” will map out the theoretical-political context within which I will present the literary-historical arguments in the subsequent chapters. Its aim will be fourfold: 1) to introduce the reader to the central debates regarding the concept of nature in environmental studies, 2) to introduce these debates in queer studies, 3) to explore the intersections between the two fields in theoretical articulations of ecofeminism and queer revisions of ecofeminism, and 4) to suggest a way of overcoming the current impasse between the two fields regarding “the natural.”

The Environmental Project

The disjunction between the ways in which ecocritics and queer critics approach the concept of nature originates in their different assumptions about science (its use and abuse) and critical theory (its use and abuse). Generally, ecocritics emphasize the use of science and the abuse of theory, and queer critics tend towards the opposite. If one considers ecocriticism as it was first articulated in the early 1990s, one senses its struggle to come to terms with the “grand theory” of the 1970s and 1980s, especially Kuhnian and Foucaultian critiques of scientific knowledge and power, as well as de Manian and Derridean critiques of referentiality and stable meaning. The prefatory “conversion narratives” that so often accompany early ecocritical monographs depict literary studies as a spiritual wasteland before the ecocritical light. While there have been important challenges to this tendency, and to ecocriticism more generally, such as Dana Phillips’s The Truth of Ecology (2003) and Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature (2007), the legacies of this anti-theoretical history are still very much present.2 Although things are certainly changing, many articles in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the field’s primary journal and regulatory apparatus, still do not engage with extra-ecocritical theoretical discourses. One article, for example, was returned with a note from an anonymous reviewer advising the author to stop worrying about “the jejune idea that everything is constructed” and to remember “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

In order to circumvent jejune ideas, early ecocriticism set out to ground its literary practice in scientific methodology, and more specifically, ecological methodology.3 If “ecological” can stand for “environmental” in contemporary popular culture, early ecocritics took a somewhat different, somewhat more precise, approach to the terminology. Scholars like William Rueckert and Karl Kroeber wanted their ecocriticism to employ the science of ecology; they wanted their criticism to be not only environmental, but also scientific. Many ecocritics looked to Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977), the standard history in the field, for a vocabulary that helped to unpack the work of writers, especially in the Anglo-American Romantic and post-Romantic tradition, who focused primarily on environmental ideas.

The first use of the term “ecocriticism” was in William Rueckert’s “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978), a short and admittedly superficial application of ecological science—specifically, the laws of ecology that Barry Commoner delineates in The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (1972)—to the practice of literary criticism. Kroeber’s 1994 study, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind, unlike Rueckert’s rudimentary theoretical venture, presents a more thorough engagement with contemporary environmental research and attempts a major definition of “ecologically oriented literary criticism.”

Kroeber’s definition has served as a touchstone for later ecocritics and has reflected a prominent ethos in the field. He writes:

This [ecological] criticism, escaping from the esoteric abstractness that afflicts current theorizing about literature, seizes opportunities offered by recent biological research to make humanistic studies more...